I was eventually seduced into reading the whole thing after some skimming, but it was a close thing for a while. I think this piece could be shorter (footnotes if you can’t lose anything), even though the writing is solid already.
I like your approach.
Vulnerable points:
1) What it means to “average” or “sum” the utility functions of individuals needs definition. The way in which individual utilities are made comparable isn’t obvious to me. I feel like we either have to declare some popular components of utility as the basis for normalization (define some common ground), or provide a framework where individuals can consciously elect any utility function (we believe what they say, because we have no perfect lie-detector) while providing a combination-of-utilities that can’t be gamed by lying (this is probably impossible).
2) “average utilitarianism is perhaps interpretable as using the metric in which the new people are not realized”—as you know, it’s only like that when the new people will have the same happiness on average. But it’s certainly more like what you say, when compared to total, than not.
3) Reasoning about recently killed people based on your instructions does seem to require care or at least hand-waving :)
4) I think you’re saying that if we currently expect to have a certain demographic of extant humans N years in the future, then we should weigh what we expect their utility to be in our decisions now (with some discount, considering them equally with living people). I guess you’d say that this should change my decisions (or at least my vote in our joint utility-maximization) even if I don’t expect to personally reproduce. But if we decide to embark on a course that will change that demographic (e.g. measure that decrease birth rate as a side effect), then we no longer need to consider any utility for the now-not-expected-to-exist population. This actually makes sense to me, in a “you break it, you buy it” sort of way.
4a) Assuming I understand you right on 4, I feel (with no underlying formal justification) that if e.g. the Amish decide to reproduce such that we expect them to be half the population in 100 years, then the expected personal utility of that half of the population should be weighed at less than half of the 100 years from now population (i.e. less valuable per capita). This may just be my selfish genes (or anti-Amish bias!) speaking.
5) How is what you advocate not just average utilitarianism?
1) Yes how we measure utility is always an issue. Most papers I’ve read don’t address it, working off the arguably fair assumption that somehow there is greater and less utility, and that anything in real life is just an approximation but you can still shoot for the former. Ideally we would just ask trustworthy people how happy or unhappy they are, or something similar. In practice and for prescribing behavior though I think we use the popular components approach, assuming most people like food and hate being tortured.
2) I’m slightly confused by this. Are you talking about bringing a large group of people into existence, with varying utilities? For simplicity I was discussing ideal theoretical cases, such as one child, or yes a new population all of roughly the same utility.
4) Yes that’s essentially my point, though I haven’t (I think) yet suggested how realization of these “decision-changed metrics” alters our decisions about potential people. But perhaps you meant simply that the wellbeing of someone who will exist should affect what we do.
4a) I would say that we should treat all people’s utility equally once they come into being, which I think agrees with what you said. The last line about anti-Amish bias seems to run counter to that idea however.
5) Before a normative rule came to me, I was going to end this post with “lacking any prescriptive power however, we might default to total or average utilitarianism”. Regardless, I’ve tried to keep this post merely descriptive. Though the rule I came up with is similar to average utilitarianism in ways, average utilitarianism has consequences as well I’m not happy with. For example, if there were 20 people with extremely high utility and 1000 with utility half that but still very good lives, as long as those 20 people didn’t mind the slaughter of the thousand, the average approach seems to advocate killing the 1000 to bring up the average.
2) I’m just agreeing that the “perhaps interpretable” is “definitely not the same as, except under certain assumptions”, which you were well aware of.
4a) I had one too many negatives (bad edit). I was indeed making an anti-Amish suggestion. That is, to the extent that some group of people are committed to a massive future population, those that are personally intending to bring about a lower population level shouldn’t necessarily be constrained in their decision making in favor of the profligate reproducers’ spawn.
It seems odd to me to value the utlity of the new Amish masses less than others’, as no one is allowed to choose why they were brought into existence, or if. If we maintain a belief in an essential equality of moral worth between people, I think we would be constrained by the reproducer’s offspring. Of course, I may not like that, but that’s an issue to be brought up with the current Amish-spawners.
That’s a reasonable suggestion. I certainly haven’t complained about the teeming Amish masses before, so if I really care, I ought to first try to exert some influence now.
What it means to “average” or “sum” the utility functions of individuals needs definition.
meh. That’s gone over well enough in the literature.
I don’t think that if e.g. the Amish decide to reproduce such that we expect them to be half the population in 100 years, then the expected personal utility of that half of the population should be weighed at less than half of the 100 years from now population (i.e. less valuable per capita). This may just be my selfish genes (or anti-Amish bias!) speaking.
This didn’t make sense to me. Did you forget that you were making a negative statement?
I was eventually seduced into reading the whole thing after some skimming, but it was a close thing for a while. I think this piece could be shorter (footnotes if you can’t lose anything), even though the writing is solid already.
I like your approach.
Vulnerable points:
1) What it means to “average” or “sum” the utility functions of individuals needs definition. The way in which individual utilities are made comparable isn’t obvious to me. I feel like we either have to declare some popular components of utility as the basis for normalization (define some common ground), or provide a framework where individuals can consciously elect any utility function (we believe what they say, because we have no perfect lie-detector) while providing a combination-of-utilities that can’t be gamed by lying (this is probably impossible).
2) “average utilitarianism is perhaps interpretable as using the metric in which the new people are not realized”—as you know, it’s only like that when the new people will have the same happiness on average. But it’s certainly more like what you say, when compared to total, than not.
3) Reasoning about recently killed people based on your instructions does seem to require care or at least hand-waving :)
4) I think you’re saying that if we currently expect to have a certain demographic of extant humans N years in the future, then we should weigh what we expect their utility to be in our decisions now (with some discount, considering them equally with living people). I guess you’d say that this should change my decisions (or at least my vote in our joint utility-maximization) even if I don’t expect to personally reproduce. But if we decide to embark on a course that will change that demographic (e.g. measure that decrease birth rate as a side effect), then we no longer need to consider any utility for the now-not-expected-to-exist population. This actually makes sense to me, in a “you break it, you buy it” sort of way.
4a) Assuming I understand you right on 4, I feel (with no underlying formal justification) that if e.g. the Amish decide to reproduce such that we expect them to be half the population in 100 years, then the expected personal utility of that half of the population should be weighed at less than half of the 100 years from now population (i.e. less valuable per capita). This may just be my selfish genes (or anti-Amish bias!) speaking.
5) How is what you advocate not just average utilitarianism?
Thanks for the helpful feedback!
1) Yes how we measure utility is always an issue. Most papers I’ve read don’t address it, working off the arguably fair assumption that somehow there is greater and less utility, and that anything in real life is just an approximation but you can still shoot for the former. Ideally we would just ask trustworthy people how happy or unhappy they are, or something similar. In practice and for prescribing behavior though I think we use the popular components approach, assuming most people like food and hate being tortured.
2) I’m slightly confused by this. Are you talking about bringing a large group of people into existence, with varying utilities? For simplicity I was discussing ideal theoretical cases, such as one child, or yes a new population all of roughly the same utility.
4) Yes that’s essentially my point, though I haven’t (I think) yet suggested how realization of these “decision-changed metrics” alters our decisions about potential people. But perhaps you meant simply that the wellbeing of someone who will exist should affect what we do.
4a) I would say that we should treat all people’s utility equally once they come into being, which I think agrees with what you said. The last line about anti-Amish bias seems to run counter to that idea however.
5) Before a normative rule came to me, I was going to end this post with “lacking any prescriptive power however, we might default to total or average utilitarianism”. Regardless, I’ve tried to keep this post merely descriptive. Though the rule I came up with is similar to average utilitarianism in ways, average utilitarianism has consequences as well I’m not happy with. For example, if there were 20 people with extremely high utility and 1000 with utility half that but still very good lives, as long as those 20 people didn’t mind the slaughter of the thousand, the average approach seems to advocate killing the 1000 to bring up the average.
1) I wish we could do better.
2) I’m just agreeing that the “perhaps interpretable” is “definitely not the same as, except under certain assumptions”, which you were well aware of.
4a) I had one too many negatives (bad edit). I was indeed making an anti-Amish suggestion. That is, to the extent that some group of people are committed to a massive future population, those that are personally intending to bring about a lower population level shouldn’t necessarily be constrained in their decision making in favor of the profligate reproducers’ spawn.
5) Please do continue with another post, then
It seems odd to me to value the utlity of the new Amish masses less than others’, as no one is allowed to choose why they were brought into existence, or if. If we maintain a belief in an essential equality of moral worth between people, I think we would be constrained by the reproducer’s offspring. Of course, I may not like that, but that’s an issue to be brought up with the current Amish-spawners.
That’s a reasonable suggestion. I certainly haven’t complained about the teeming Amish masses before, so if I really care, I ought to first try to exert some influence now.
meh. That’s gone over well enough in the literature.
This didn’t make sense to me. Did you forget that you were making a negative statement?
It’s hard to have a sensible conversation about it without the definition, though.
Yep, Franken-edit. I’ve removed the extra negative for posterity.